Lowyat.NET: Latest topics by iWill

Someone wants to buy my site

iWill — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:00:02 +0800

I got a call yesterday and on the other end of the phone was a young guy asking for the details of my site and showing interest in acquiring it.

My question is that since the domains are both .com.my and .my, they are registered under my company name. If I actually sell it I believe I should transfer the ownership to the new owner. I never sell a local domain site before and wonder how to go about in changing the owner's details. For TLD .com domain, it's pretty straight forward but I'm a bit not sure about the local domain.

Anyone know?

EMAGINE IPTV Service

iWill — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 19:13:22 +0800

This is a new set top box that's current selling at RM399 at Lazada. It's said to have 200 online channels but I'm not very sure what the channels are.

Anyone has tried this or know about the channels offered?

http://www.emagine.my/

http://www.lowyat.net/2013/02/28/5616/emag...ice-is-in-town/

LLP is now open for registration

iWill — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 15:21:49 +0800

Apparently, SSM has open up the registration for LLP today. You can head to their website and see more details.

QUOTE

What is it?

Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) is an alternative business vehicle regulated under the Limited Liability Partnerships Act 2012 which combines the characteristics of a company and a conventional partnership.

Who is it for?

The LLP business structure is designed for all lawful business purposes with a view to make profit. LLP may also be formed by professionals such as Lawyers, Chartered Accountants and Company Secretaries for the purpose of carrying on their professional practice. The LLP concept will also support start ups, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to grow their businesses without having to worry too much on their personal liabilities, personal assets and strict compliance requirements.

http://www.ssm.com.my/en/LLP-AboutLLP

Company Secretary + setting up new company

iWill — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 13:13:57 +0800

I am currently looking to setup a new company. Some one quoted me 3k and 2.5 k respectively from 2 different companies. Looking at the big difference between the two of them, I'm wondering what's the market rate right now. Both will require a 1k annual maintenance fee. Am I getting a fair quotation?

How to get transactions history?

iWill — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 11:20:09 +0800

How can we get the transaction history of an apartment/ condo or taman? Do we have to pay for those information?

Getting those info will be good to benchmark the offering/ selling price of a property, or see how the trend is for a particular area. I would think this is valuable data and might need certain way to korek a bit.

Korea Stock Exchange

iWill — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 10:57:13 +0800

Anyone know how to buy the stocks in Korea Stock Exchange? Which online broker offers this?

Lazada Malaysia - Epic Fail

iWill — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 07:41:12 +0800

Lazada Malaysia the Amazon clone by Rocket Internet... the moment of epic fail

SSL certificate

iWill — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 11:53:02 +0800

Which ssl certificate would you recommend? Something not too expensive and relatively secure and reliable is what I'm looking for.

Are you thinking too hard for a business idea?

iWill — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 21:38:14 +0800

[This is a sharing]

Some good references you can use in the article below to start a business with low capital - 1k or less.

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2012/...essons-learned/

QUOTE

I sometimes hear from people who say that not all businesses can be started on the cheap. This is true. If you want to open a factory, you might need more than $100. If you want to found a VC-backed tech start-up, you might need to woo investors. But the point remains: you can start many different kinds of businesses without going into debt. All things are equal, why not take that route if the costs are low?

QUOTE

Gary Leff used his Frequent Flyer Miles to travel all over the world in First Class, and his friends kept asking for advice. Almost on a whim, he decided to launch a basic website offering the service of booking travel awards for a fee.

His service is something that people could do on their own for free—but plenty of people don’t know how it works or just don’t want the hassle of dealing with airline call centers. This “side business” now brings in more than $100,000 a year.

Google App Engine

iWill — Mon, 14 May 2012 07:49:22 +0800

Anyone has the site hosted with Google App Engine? Is the service worth the cost? How about in term of support? Any sharing/ story about it will be nice

Is our consumer ready for the internet business?

iWill — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 02:40:44 +0800

So recently a Singapore internet startup has folded. The reason of why they folded is interesting - not because of they don't have enough funding (in fact they are about to be acquired) but something more closer to the culture and consumer behavior of the region, and I think Malaysia included.

Since I run a small "eCommerce" business online so I could actually feel dearly on what the founder said. It is with the problem or the mentality of the internet consumer in this region where they are much less sophisticated compared to country like the US and most part of Europe. Below is how how the founder put it in his interview.

QUOTE

E-commerce took off in the US but not among smaller mum-and-pop stores here. We found a very strange thing about how people behave in the Asian market. It’s not the value proposition we provide but the behavior. People here are not that ready to take a step onto the Internet.

Our initial thesis was: We want to help small businesses? It is very tough. We were hoping that if we give it out for free, in a freemium model, they would come and try out the service.

But anytime we did a marketing or news media push, here’s the difference we saw: With the lead generation we got from public relations, people in Asia would call us or email and we have to support them manually. From there we have to do sales calls otherwise there’ll be a steep drop off and they won’t try out the service. How you do sales call and handholding support for a free product?

In the US, by doing one article we were getting 20 or 30 people coming online to try us out from across the US. People in the US understood it, people here don’t.

The US market was also more sophisticated. We had different copies for both US and Singapore sites. Here, our site used simpler English. Otherwise the mum-and-pop stores wouldn’t get what we were doing.

Funnily enough, we also have a lot of money owed by customers. In Asia, there’s a lot of collection problems. We spent time chasing money, often getting cheques that we cannot cash. There was one large company that didn’t pay for 18 months. And that sum of money isn’t much to them. It was these small things that were hurting us. We were losing energy in places that were quite marginal. And hiring people to chase money just didn’t seem right.

If you notice that I said I have an "eCommerce" business, I wouldn't put it in the same space as those in the US. The majority of my customer require hand holding to close the deal with them. They would only feel better if you can chat with them over messenger or some request you to be on phone before they will give you their money. As you can see, the problem with this kind of business model is that it's hard for you to scale without adding lot of customer/ sales reps. In the US, the startups invest in the technology to automate and scale their business and the customer will be able to figure out themselves to get the product/ services they wanted from you, whereas at here we have to put in extra resources which we intend to replace it with technology to support the customer.

Is the consumer in this region that far behind? Why are they not ready to make the move into the digital age?

Another business idea

iWill — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 02:10:05 +0800

I shared one business idea about going after Mudah and Lelong last week.

Today here is another one which I think is a lot more capital intensive.

Let's state the problem we want to tackle: High oil price

Oil price has gone up skyrocketing since few years back, and it continue to go up higher recently. If it isn't the election year, one would expect the petrol price to get adjusted upward soon if not already.

Let's see how we solve this - and earn some cash in the process.

First step: Buy/ Rent a Petrol station
Next: Tell everyone in the world you are going to let everyone to fill up the petrol for FREE!

Oh FREE??!... don't you set yourself for bankrupt doing that? Oh wait... here is the catch:

Install 360 degree cameras all over the petrol station to cover every angle, and install paintball guns all around it as well
Make sure the cameras and the guns are connected to internet. Create a website and let people pay for credits like RM5 (or whatever you want) to get a shot on the people coming to fill up the petrol. Another catch, make the flow rate really slow so it feels like taking forever to fill up a full tank.

You probably need a big disclaimer and a live or dead contract for those coming for free petrol.

I think it will make money and you get lots of publicity by itself without you doing any marketing.

It's a million dollar idea, if you want to make this, let me know.

A web/ mobile app idea

iWill — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 07:32:35 +0800

So I have this idea which I think it will beat the hell out of mudah.my and lelong.my.

The idea is simple and I think it suit the lifestyle of the current generation. Here is how it goes.

The problem
People nowadays have lot of thing that they hoard but don't know what to do with them. We have lot of classified website for those people to cash in their unwanted stuff but you'll have to login, register and fill up forms to get your items listed - which some considered as inconvenience.

So, what you can do?

A mobile App
A mobile app that allow the users to snap picture easily for the things that they wanna sell online. Simple enough, they snap a picture and it will only be the price and a short description for the item to fill up and then it can be sent to your website to get listed.

When a buyer is interested, they contact the seller via the website/ app and the seller get notification on their mobile and the discussion can go on from there. You could also have the transaction done on the app/ online directly.

A Clean listing site
You will have a mobile enable website listing items people can browse through their mobile phone or on PC. Make it clean and easy to navigate.

It's not too difficult to get it done - some app developer will be able to build it within weeks.

So, what do you think?

Business idea

iWill — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 07:31:57 +0800

Google changes to its search

iWill — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 01:42:44 +0800

QUOTE

Over the next few months, Google's search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page.

The changes to search are among the biggest in the company's history and could affect millions of websites that rely on Google's current page-ranking results. At the same time, they could give Google more ways to serve up advertisements.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405...2851136290.html

Let's hope our sites are not greatly affected this time...

Website development market

iWill — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:34:20 +0800

I have the urge to engage a web development company to develop eCommerce portal that will engage both sellers and buyers, something like lelong, lot.my or the like. I just want to know the hourly rate that the website development industry/ companies will charge to be able to estimate the budget vs the features I need. Anyone have any info or have dealt with those website development companies before? Or how much you think in term of $$ to develop such comprehensive custom CMS?

Maybank traseaction frequency

iWill — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 09:57:53 +0800

Anyone knows how many transactions can a normal saving account take? I have a saving account that stops accepting any online transfer after a x number of transaction. I have to call the bank to print out all the transaction to clear the queue before the new online transactions can start again.

Wired that only Maybank has this problem, the other banks I use seems ok. Maybank just doesn't like people to give them money

New Year's resolution as a Webmaster

iWill — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 08:40:42 +0800

What would you want to achieve this new year 2012?

I wanted to build a site one year ago but the script never get ready, I have invested lot of money in it I hope this year I can finally launch it.

One more - I hope to be able to code like a pro. So I'm on codeyear.com now. I hope some of you will join me

Wish all the best for the webmasters in 2012!

RM25 .com.my and RM38 .my

iWill — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:40:55 +0800

Anyone tried this host before? - http://www.zenpipe.com/domain_name

They have some really cheap domain registration fee with RM25 for .com.my and RM38 for .my Thinking of trying but not sure they are reliable.

The parent company is called Art In Software Sdn Bhd (AIST).

A review from you guys will be great.

Property Market Downgraded

iWill — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:09:55 +0800

Looks like the local property sector has started to cool down now since beginning of this year. Most of the property related stocks have fallen 10% -25% since last month according to a research firm on the news Malaysia Property Market Downgraded.

Some of the big names like Mah Sing, has been downgraded recently too.

So now is the good time to buy?